Hate speech has no place anywhere on TV, and Carlson was continually pushing the envelope. Will primetime cable TV be better as a result of his departure? It would be hard to imagine that it wouldn’t be. Through such words and acts, Carlson became one of the sneering faces of White privilege, and one of the leading TV spokespeople of many MAGA values and a virulent verbal attacker of all things those on the far right might consider “woke.” 6 insurrection, including the false claim that “federal agents encouraged the violence.” Opinion: The real loser in the Fox News caseĪdvertisers boycotted his show in response to such rhetoric, and just like Trump, he regularly played the aggrieved victim, claiming he was being targeted by left-wing groups and his First Amendment rights were being violated.Ĭarlson pushed the outrage button more and more in recent years, taking his show to Hungary in 2021, for example, to celebrate the authoritarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and hold him up as a strong and successful leader in opposition of President Joe Biden who he characterized as weak and ineffectual on issues like immigration.Ĭarlson’s most recent outrage involved using videotapes that House Speaker Kevin McCarthy supplied him with to try to create a primetime counter-narrative to the deadly Jan. Building and Fox News Headquarters, New York, NY, April 18, 2023. It was closer to hate speech than primetime mainstream cable talk when he suggested in 2018 that immigrants made the nation “dirtier.”Ī pedestrian walks past signage outside News Corp. What Carlson triggered with his words and actions was more than just controversy. That was evident when Fox Corp.’s stock initially dropped 5% on the news of Carlson’s departure.Ĭarlson achieved that kind of prominence through the cultural role he came to play, as a Trump-like figure constantly transgressing media boundaries from the right just as former President Donald Trump did with political norms. And it is hard to believe it won’t be for the better as we enter what could be one of the nastiest presidential campaigns in American history.Ī performer who attracts an audience of as many as 3 million viewers a night and dominates the ratings as Carlson did doesn’t suddenly disappear without significantly altering the landscape in a competitive sense. As one of the most popular and divisive hosts on cable television, his departure is sure to significantly change the face of primetime news and talk TV.
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